Blogsite of Frequently Reported

Y'all ain't gonna believe this, but the Net is rampant with reports of Windows Media Player 11 actually improving the load-times for zones in World of Warcraft. I did some hunting around, and discovered this article from one of the more reliable WoW rumorsites.

There's been no official Blizzard response to this yet, although a likely explanation is that WMP modifies how your computer handles background applications. With WMP open, all available CPU resources apparently become allocated to WoW, leading to better performance.

I'll leave the decision up to you whether or not to actually run WMP11 tabbed out or not. For me, it's not much of an option, since I use a far more pimp media player.